Glass Ceiling Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Biased based impediment - Research Paper Example This implies despite the fact that ladies are as of now ready to climb to higher situations, at one point they are halted by an inconspicuous obstruction. This is experienced by the individuals who are upset from being advanced in view of their ethnic connection as well as in light of the fact that they are ladies. In any case, progress has been made over the most recent ten years. As indicated by the CEO of Highfield Human Solutions, Sherilyn Shackell, â€Å"There is no uncertainty that ladies have advanced significantly among our worldwide workforce, particularly in the course of the last not many decades† (AMA, 2010, para 7). She further included, â€Å"Yet, notwithstanding reports that ladies are getting through the ‘glass ceiling,’ apparently the roof is simply ‘slightly cracked’ as opposed to broken† (AMA, 2010, para 7). The International Institute for Management Development (IMD) research in 2010 revealed a few upsetting patterns: a simple 20 percent of all administrators are ladies, with right around 50 percent of respondents conceding the absolute nonappearance of ladies inside the official board of trustees gathering; and, about 10 percent of official individuals have a place with minority gatherings (AMA, 2010, para 4-6). In any case, regardless of the considerable number of fights against the unfair limitation, corporate America is in reality achieving much as far as permitting ladies to possess ground-breaking corporate positions. Truth be told, as expressed in the review of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States has minimal inconsistency between the level of ladies possessing senior administration posts and the level of male ranking directors (Rampell, 2013). Since the 1960s’ social strife, the American government has been overwhelmingly occupied with restricting sexual orientation separation in associations. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is the key rule tending to the issues of unattainable rank. The law solidly restricts a wide range of separation dependent on national root, sex, religion, or race in the working environment (Palmer and

The Silver Linings Playbook Chapter 7

I Fear Him More Than Any Other Human Being After I came back to New Jersey, I thought I was sheltered, in light of the fact that I didn't think Kenny G could leave the terrible spot, which I understand is senseless now †in light of the fact that Kenny G is incredibly capable and creative and an amazing power to be dealt with. I have been resting in the loft since it is so savagely hot up here. After my folks hit the hay, I climb the steps, turn off the ventilation fan, slip into my old winter camping bed, zipper it up so just my face is uncovered, and afterward sweat away the pounds. Without the ventilation fan running, the temperature climbs rapidly, and soon my camping cot is doused with sweat and I can feel myself getting more slender. I had done this for a few evenings, and nothing odd or uncommon occurred by any means. Be that as it may, in the storage room today around evening time I'm perspiring and perspiring and perspiring, and through the obscurity, out of nowhere I hear the attractive synthesizer harmonies. I keep my eyes shut, murmur a solitary note, and quietly tally to ten, realizing that I am just daydreaming like Dr. Patel said I may, yet Kenny smacks me over the face, and when I open my eyes, there he is in my folks' storage room, his wavy mane of hair haloed like Jesus. The consummately tanned temple, that nose, that everlasting five o'clock shadow and sharp facial structure. The main three catches of his shirt are fixed so you can see a little chest hair. Mr. G probably won't appear to be abhorrent, however I dread him more than some other individual. â€Å"How? How could you find me?† I ask him. Kenny G winks at me and afterward puts his sparkling soprano sax to his lips. I shudder, despite the fact that I am soaked in sweat. â€Å"Please,† I beseech him, â€Å"just leave me alone!† Be that as it may, he takes a full breath and his soprano sax begins to sing the brilliant notes of â€Å"Songbird† †and quickly I'm upstanding in my camping bed, monotonously hammering the impact point of my correct hand into the little white scar over my correct eyebrow, attempting to make the music stop †Kenny G's hips are influencing directly before my eyes †with each cerebrum shock I'm shouting, â€Å"Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!† †the finish of his instrument is in my face, beating me with smooth jazz †I feel the blood surging up into my brow †Kenny G's performance has arrived at a peak †blast, blast, blast, blast †And afterward my mom and father are attempting to limit my arms, yet I'm shouting, â€Å"Stop playing that melody! Simply stop! Please!† At the point when my mom gets thumped to the floor, my dad kicks me hard in the stomach †which makes Kenny G disappear and executes the music †and when I fall back heaving for air, Dad bounces on my chest and punches me in the cheek, and out of nowhere my mother is attempting to pull Dad off me and I'm wailing like an infant; my mom is shouting at my dad, instructing him to quit hitting me, and afterward he's off me and she's disclosing to me everything will be alright significantly after my dad has punched me in the face as hard as could reasonably be expected. â€Å"That's it, Jeanie. He's returning to that medical clinic in the first part of the day. First thing,† my dad says, and afterward steps down the steps. I can scarcely believe, I'm crying so noisily. My mom plunks down close to me and says, â€Å"It's alright, Pat. I'm here.† I put my head in my mom's lap and weep well into the night as Mom strokes my hair. At the point when I open my eyes, the ventilation fan is back on, sun is spilling through the screen in the closest window, and Mom is as yet stroking my hair. â€Å"How did you sleep?† she asks me, constraining a grin. Her eyes are red and her cheeks are streaked with tears. For a subsequent it feels ideal to lie close to my mother, the heaviness of her little hand on my head, her delicate voice waiting in my ear, however soon the memory of what happened the prior night compels me to sit up †and afterward my heart is beating and a rush of fear flows through my appendages. â€Å"Don't send me back to the awful spot. I'm heartbroken. I'm so grieved. Please,† I implore her, begging all that I have, in light of the fact that that is the amount I loathe the awful spot and cynical Dr. Timbers. â€Å"You're remaining right here with us,† Mom says †looking at me without flinching as she does when she is coming clean †and afterward she kisses me on the cheek. We go down to the kitchen, where she cooks me some heavenly eggs mixed with cheddar and tomatoes, and I really swallow the entirety of my pills since I believe I owe it to Mom in the wake of wrecking her and upsetting my dad. I am stunned when I take a gander at the clock and see it is as of now 11:00 a.m. So I start my exercise when my plate is spotless, twofold planning everything just to stay aware of my everyday practice.

American Revolution Lesson Introducing Claims in Argumentative Writing

American Revolution Lesson Introducing Claims in Argumentative Writing (1) This is the second  in a series of lessons that teach research and writing skills around the topic of the American Revolution. Also, dont forget to have students  cite their sources in  MLA format, APA format, or  Chicago style. Overview In this lesson, you will learn how to introduce precise, knowledgeable claims and to establish their significance. Claims in Argumentative Writing Argumentative writing is based on a claim. A claim states your position on a topic. It is an arguable statement that is supported by evidence. There can be many different types of claims: Claims of fact: whether or not something is true Claims of cause and effect: whether or not an event led to an event that followed it Claims of value: whether or not something is good Claims of policy: whether one course of action is better than another Writing Claims Your goal is to write a precise, knowledgeable claim. In other words, you want to craft a position statement that makes an argument, introduces your reasoning, and describes exactly what you will say in your essay. How to Write Claims You want to make your claim as focused, or precise, as possible. Claims must be debatable as well. Do this by: Telling your reader your answer to a  question Introducing your reasons Telling your reader the categories of evidence you will discuss Arguing a position with which others may reasonably disagree. In argumentative writing, claims take on the role of thesis statements. For example,  The American Revolution was a world war because…is the beginning of a thesis statement. Why is Your Claim Significant? Your claim needs to answer the question “So what?” You can do this by explaining the  significance.  Significance is important because it goes beyond the statement of facts; significance indicates how your argument fits into a larger debate. As a writer, you want to make sure your claims are provocative and interesting. The significance statement implies a “because” with an opinion to back it up. Claims Significance: Example For example, a claim about the American Revolution being a world war could indicate significance by stating “this was the only war of its type in history,” or, “without the involvement of other nations, the Americans would not have won.” Either statement positions your argument within a bigger historical conversation. Historical Claim Example Read the claim: Different countries fought with the American during the Revolution and this is what made it a world war. Then, listen to the clip below: Here is an example of a claim that answers the question: Can the American Revolution be considered a world war? Think about what could be done to strengthen the claim. Historical Claim Example Listen to the clip below: Here is an example of a revised claim to answer the question, Can the American Revolution be considered a world war? The American Revolution became a world war when France, Spain and the Netherlands allied and fought with the United States in North America, the Caribbean, Europe and elsewhere during the Revolution, forcing the British to agree to American independence. The presence of multiple foreign allies and a global theater for the conflict, the American Revolution became a world war. Conclusion In this lesson, you learned how to write precise and significant claims.

Fdr And The Great Depression - 1842 Words

Few Presidents have faced situations as troubled as Franklin Delano Roosevelt did when he was elected into office. The economy was in shambles and unemployment was skyrocketing. However, few Presidents have impacted the country as swiftly and effectively as FDR either. He set out to bring an end to the Great Depression, which had been created by fear itself. Undaunted, FDR and Congress, together, were able to pass a whopping 15 major bills in FDR’s first 100 days in office as a part of his New Deal. While each bill was important and extremely impactful in its own respect, the CCC, TVA, and FDIC are, when reflected upon today, considered to be the most successful programs created under these bills. When FDR was elected President in 1932, the United States was deep in the most severe economic depression the country had ever experienced: the Great Depression. The Great Depression had taken shape almost four years prior to FDR’s Inauguration with the crash of the stock market bubble in 1929. Following the stock market crash, companies began laying off workers due to a sudden drop in investment and consumer spending. This led to a vicious period of cyclical unemployment and the depression became even worse. Eventually, there were runs on the banks as people tried to guarantee the security of whatever savings they had left. This, too, only made things worse as banks were unprepared and thousands failed. The load that FDR faced entering the Presidency had not been lessened by hisShow MoreRelatedFdr And The Great Depression783 Words   |  4 Pagesterms, FDR has had many successful outcomes during his presidency into what shapes our nation today. (Relationship) FDR progressed with many achievements to help America revive and prosper. (THESIS) The response of Franklin Delano Roosevelt s administration to the problems of The Great Depression was effective because they created the New Deal program, revived enterprise, and made better use of the country s land. Acknowledgement of other side- There was different opinions on how FDR managedRead MoreFdr s Folly : How Roosevelt And His New Deal Prolonged The Great Depression1366 Words   |  6 PagesIn FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression, Jim Powell discusses how Roosevelt’s New Deal actually prolonged the Great Depression and made it significantly worse economically for the people in the 1930s United States. Powell reveals a different angle of the â€Å"hero† Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his New Deal, and how he allegedly lead the United States out of the Great Depression. Throughout this book, the author analyzes the actions and repercussions of Roo sevelt’sRead MoreThe Great Depression And World War II1507 Words   |  7 PagesFaced with the Great Depression and World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt, nicknamed â€Å"FDR,† guided America through its greatest domestic crisis, with the exception of the Civil War, and its greatest foreign crisis. His presidency—which spanned twelve years—was unparalleled, not only in length but in scope. FDR took office with the country mired in a horrible and debilitating economic depression that not only sapped its material wealth and spiritual strength, but cast a pall over its future. RooseveltRead MorePresident Fdr : A Nation s Economic Status Is A Great Responsibility That Its Government Has1259 Words   |  6 Pages2016 Resident President Keeping a country’s economic status is a great responsibility that its government has. In America during the 1930’s, the Great Depression spreads its economic disease to Americans, and as a result, many citizens become jobless and homeless. While Americans are under economic depression, little has been done by the government to ameliorate the situation. However, President FDR is the MVP during the Great Depression as he brings economic prosperity and well-being to America byRead MoreFranklin D. Roosevelt. During The Great Depression In The1745 Words   |  7 PagesDuring The Great Depression in the United States, 13 million people and the country were in an economic crisis. The nation blamed the Republican party for the economic crisis and for their inability to fix it by the 1932 election.Thus, the election resulted in a win for Democratic Party and the former governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On March 4 1933, Roosevelt was inaugurated president by a na tion in need of hope. FDR took action immediately to deal with the depression by closingRead MoreThe Great Depression Trademarks America1544 Words   |  7 Pages The Great Depression trademarks America at its all-time historical down point. In FDR’s Folly, Powell spotlights the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, astronomical levels of unemployment, as well as the New Deal program developed to combat the Great Depression. Powell, who was born and educated in London, earned a master’s degree in history and he clearly demonstrates his views to the reader. In his words, FDR’s presidency did not aid the economic state but drove it further back as well asRead MoreRhetorical Analysis Of Franklin D. Roosevelt s Inauguration Speech1519 Words   |  7 Pagesas the Great Depression. Fifteen million Americans went unemployed, half the country’s banks failed, and Wall Street lost billions of dollars. Devastated and hopeless, Americans searched for a resolution, a savior. In 1933, during the peak of the depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sworn in as the 32nd President of The United States. Roosevelt replaced Herber t Hoover who left the country in agony. Through the domestic programs established by President Roosevelt, the effects of the Great DepressionRead MoreImpact Of The New Deal On The Great Depression1355 Words   |  6 Pages Impact of the New Deal on the Great Depression Preceding the Great Depression, the United States went through a glorious age of prosperity, with a booming market, social changes, and urbanization; America was changing. At the end of the 1920’s and well through the 1930’s, America was faced with its greatest challenge yet; the 1929 stock market crash. It would be the end of the prosperity of the â€Å"Roaring Twenties†. Now the American government and its citizens were faced with a failing economyRead MoreA Brief Biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt1008 Words   |  5 PagesFranklin Delano Roosevelt Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR, was born in 1882 and attended both Harvard University and Columbia Law School (White House). Serving from March 1933-April 1945, FDR became America’s longest serving president (Miller Center). He entered office in the midst of the Great Depression, America’s major financial crisis. Everyone was investing in the stock market, and when it crashed, America came close to bankruptcy. The crash of the stock market left people without money, jobsRead MoreThe Economic Impacts Of The Great Depression1263 Words   |  6 PagesRodena Woods History 102 Exam 2- Essay Answers Big Essay Question The economic downturn is considered the great depression from 1929-1941 because of the uncontrolled exertion on unlimited goods produced. Other contributions were the risky and irresponsible speculations in the stock market. Banks had invested and lost, and they were buying on margin. There was also increasingly unequal distribution of wealth. Furthermore, the U.S had weak banking systems and banks eventually failed. Finally, there

Special Education Placement in Public Schools Essay examples

Special Education Placement in Public Schools History of Public Schools Before the 1840’s the education system was only available to wealthy people. Individuals such as Horace Mann from Massachusetts and Henry Barnard in Connecticut believed that schooling for everybody would help individuals become productive citizens in society. Through their efforts, free public education at the elementary level become assessable for all children in American by late 19th century. By 1918 all states passed laws that required children to attend elementary school. The Catholics were against this law, so they created their own private schools. In 1925 the Supreme Court passed a law that allowed children to attend private school rather than public school†¦show more content†¦These intelligences are Bodily-kinesthetic, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, Linguistic, Logical-mathematical, Musical, Naturalistic and Spatial. Garner believed â€Å"A single number (a score on an IQ test) cannot adequately represent the complex and diverse capabilities of a human being † (Oregon Technology in Education Council, 2011). Garner’s theory is related to how students learn and how they can develop skills in certain areas. These different types of intelligences are critical to the growth of students in the classroom. Robert Steinberg’s Triarchiac Theory also contains multiple intelligences, such as Practical Intelligence, Creative Intelligence and Analytical Intelligences. These various intelligences adopts many all the same ideas as Howard Garner’s theory, but the difference is Steinberg does not focus on one specific type of intelligence, but he is more focused on helping the student enhance their skills. Steinberg believed that intelligence can be learned through more practice and study. David Perkins explains IQ in three components, Neural Intelligence, Experiential Intelligence and Reflective Intelligence. Perkins theory discusses different types of intelligences like Steinberg and Garner. Perkins argues that education can be improved by incorporating more advanced studies in the classroom (Oregon Technology in Education Council, 2011). Question to Encourage Higher OrderShow MoreRelatedA Free Appropriate Public Education Essay709 Words   |  3 Pages1. A Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE):† All children with disabilities, regardless of the type or severity of their disability, shall receive a free, appropriate public education. This education must be provided at public expense—that is, without cost to the child’s parents. An individualized education program (IEP) must be developed and implemented to meet the unique needs of each student with a disability. The IEP specifies the child’s unique educational needs, states present levels ofRead MoreWho Decides Where Jerry Goes For School? Family And Educator Conflict From Special Education Placement Essay767 Words   |  4 PagesGoes to School? Family and Educator Conflict in Special Education Placement† by John J. Steffen and Joanne M. Marshall (2006). The school and district’s administrators are facing a conflict with the placement of a special education student. After being diagnosed with several medical disabilities which affected his behavior, the student struggled to achieve success in the initial placement that was chosen for his academic experiences as part of his inclusion in the Exceptional Student Education (ESE)Read MoreThe Individual With Disabilities Act974 Words   |  4 PagesIndividual with Disabilities Act (IDEA, 2001) is the federal act enacted to ensure all students with disabilities receive a free appropriate public education (FAPE). Once a student has received the proper assessments and is found eligible for services an IEP is written to address student weaknesses. Mandates in IDEA (2001) oversee how states and other public agencies provide early intervention and related services to students in need. As part of IDEA, students with disabilities are required to beRead More Discipline and Students with Disabilities Essay906 Words   |  4 Pages Public Law 94-142: The Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, now called Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), requires states to provide free, appropriate public education (FAPE) for every child regardless of disability. This federal law was the first to clearly define the rights of disabled children to receive special education services if their disability affects their educational performance. A parent of a special education student also has basic rights under IDEAR ead MoreEvolution of Special Needs Essay example993 Words   |  4 Pagesin the shoes of parents with special needs children. I have two beautiful healthy daughters and to think about being pregnant and expecting to deliver your bundle of joy and when she arrives you find out something is wrong. You can look at her and tell she is different, but you just do not want to accept it. It saddens me to think how any parent would feel in this situation. In my research about the historical evolution of special education I found most special needs children were sent a wayRead MoreInclusion Of Special Needs For Students With Disabilities Essay1174 Words   |  5 Pagesstructuring the education system to include students with disabilities, there has being an ongoing research topic of inclusion. Inclusion, in this area, means the full inclusion of students with special needs in the general education classroom . The research and the debates about the issue of whether or not there should be full inclusion of Special Education students in all general education classrooms in all public schools throughout the United States rages on. The number of students with special needs thatRead MoreInclusion Of Special Needs For Students With Disabilities1173 Words   |  5 Pagesstructuring the education system to include students with disabilities, there has being an ongoing research topic of inclusion. Inclusion, in this area, means the full inclus ion of students with special needs in the general education classroom. The research and the debates about the issue of whether or not there should be full inclusion of Special Education students in all general education classrooms in all public schools throughout the United States rages on. The number of students with special needs thatRead MoreExceptional Children: Children with Physical Disabilities or Sensory Impairments968 Words   |  4 PagesThe differences among most children are quite minor, allowing them to benefit from the general education program. Heward (2014) stated that the physical characteristics and/or learning characteristics of exceptional children differ from the norm, either above or below, to such an extent that they require an individualized program of special education and related services to get full value from education. The term exceptional children include children who have difficulties in understanding and learningRead MoreThe Individuals With Disabili ties Education Act1711 Words   |  7 PagesIndividuals with Disabilities Education Act and the Meaning of â€Å"Free Appropriate Public Education† for Students with Disabilities is detailed below: Congress passed the IDEA in 1975 to ensure that children with disabilities had the opportunity to receive an appropriate education. To qualify for federal funding under the Act, a state must demonstrate that it has a policy in effect that â€Å"assures all handicapped children the right to a free appropriate education.†6 IDEA requires school districts to teach childrenRead MoreThe Individuals With Disabilities Act846 Words   |  4 Pagesthat requires schools to serve the educational needs of eligible students with disabilities† (Lee, 2014). IDEA was first put into place to protect the rights of children with disabilities and serves students from when they are infants through high school graduation or when they turn the age of 21. Because of IDEA, all children, including those with disabilities, are entitled to a free and appropriate public education (FAPE). IDEA also requires all students to get their education in the least restrictive

Virginia Woolf’s Feminism Free Essays

Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women In 1797. Her tract was based on the enlightenment that she used in many of her arguments. She believed that reason, rationality and virtue lead to a better society. We will write a custom essay sample on Virginia Woolf’s Feminism or any similar topic only for you Order Now She also believed that reason and education would improve the status of women, and that the improvement of women leads to the improvement of society. Some of the most important principles of feminism are relying on rationality, voicing your pinion, developing the right terminology and that gender definitions are based on social norms. Another feminist who influenced Woolf was John Stewart Mill who discussed another Important principle of feminism, understanding what â€Å"nature† Is. He argued that what goes by the name â€Å"unnatural† generally means â€Å"uncustomary. Feminism debates what society thinks Is unnatural. He believes that the subjection of women is a universal custom making feminism a universal issue. Mill also argues that women have always been subjected to men so one cannot claim that It Is it natural. He asserts that to decide what is natural is highly debatable. What Is now called the nature of women is an artificial result of forced repression and unnatural stimulation where women are treated as a commodity. Being influenced by other feminists and her own personal experiences, Virginia Woolf developed her own feminist tract A Room of One’s Own in 1929. It has been called the â€Å"founding book of feminist literary criticism†. The book covered the following principles. The book opens with Woolf announcing her maln argument. women need to be free to have their own economical independence and have their own identity. Only when they have their own sanctuary of ones self, can they have artistic freedom which means being economically independent and not having to write Just in order to make money. Woolf Insists that poverty Is key and women were not allowed to own anything, Just as John Stewart Mill and Mary Wollstonecraft claimed that women were repressed. Women have been Impoverished and undereducated that is the reason they were few female writers, not because women were useless and did not know how to write. Women were made Inferior, Woolf continues by speaking about the British Library, hich was under patriarchal rule. Woolf could only go to specific places in the library and eat In certain places as well. That shows that men governed the society and they were considered to be the more superior and capable gender. The narrator then moved on to another point, stating that the superiority of men is constantly being reinforced In literature. The weakness of women was structured by men. Woolf insists that the weakness of women is not innate; it is because women were repressed into being the way they were. Men continuously reinforced the stereotype nternalizing that form of reception and values. Woolf then proposes a question: † If women are so Inferior then why are there so many Interesting heroines in literature? showing us that the role of exceptional female characters was highlighted. However, 1 OF2 traditional roles were considered far less important than men’s. Woolf believed that we should change the status of women’s â€Å"work† which is domestic and not belittle the role of women, instead reconceptualize the role of women. Woolf also believed that if you confine women into a limited environment how do you expect them to write bout something else? Women are confin ed to the domestic sphere, which limits their writing abilities. Great art is produced by those who are free in mind and spirit. If women write knowing that they will be disapproved of or laughed at this will affect the quality of their work. Freedom and creativity go hand in hand. Woolf believes the first great writer is Jane Austen. She also believes that writing is not about gender, it is about something much deeper. Finally Woolf argues that the truly great minds are androgynous which means belonging to neither sex. A writer should be neither asculine nor feminine but a combination of both. Virginia Woolf’s themes in her feminist tract are equal opportunity for both sexes, which does not mean erasing differences, but to â€Å"invalidate the gender class system†. One must differentiate and realize that equal opportunity does not mean melting away the differences between male and female. Another theme that was covered was truth versus opinion. One must distinguish between theory and opinion from truth. The third and final theme is changing men’s attitudes towards women, and more crucially women’s attitudes towards themselves. How to cite Virginia Woolf’s Feminism, Papers

Hacking For Money Essay Example For Students

Hacking For Money Essay Many of the products we buy today are no more than large collections of zeroes and ones. High-priced software, high-quality music, and valuable reference material such as computerized databases or CD-Rom encyclopedias are commercial products like any other, but the media of their transmission makes them different in at least one aspect: it is possible to copy them freely, or at least extremely cheaply. A compact disc of Elvis Costello and the Attractions is different from, say, a ham and swiss sandwich in many ways, but beyond the obvious is one reason that makes the nature of the two items and their roduction and purchase very different indeed: I can only eat the ham and swiss sandwich once, while I can listen to the Attractions CD repeatedly. This is a result of the fact that the CD contains information, rather than an actual substance such as the sandwich has. The consumable material in the sandwich is actual food and is gone after its consumption, while the consumable material in the compact disc is encoded binary data that will be around for the life of the physical disc. Since the sandwich can only be consumed once, we pay out an amount of money that signifies what one sandwich is worth to us. If I want nother sandwich, I pay another $4. 95. If someone were to invent a ham and swiss sandwich that could be eaten thousands of times (lets not go into the mechanics of how this would work) then the producer might be justified in charging many times the cost of an ordinary ham and swiss, on the grounds that Im getting more than just one sandwich. Buy our sandwich once, and youll never go hungry again! However, one might protest this idea if we know that it still costs the usual amount to make the sandwich. If a producer can make a repeatedly-edible sandwich for a couple dollars, and sell it for $4,000, he tands to profit hugely. The reason we might be able to justify charging four grand for a ham sandwich is that in our usual structure of sales and ownership, we agree with the vendor to pay a price reflective of what the product is worth to us, the consumer. In this light, its irrelevant that the producer only spent $2. 50 to make that repeatedly-edible sandwich, because to me as a consumer such a sandwich is worth thousands. Or to return to the example of the compact disc; its irrelevant that the producer only paid a nickel to produce each disc, because to me its worth fifteen dollars to be able to listen to Punch the Clock at my leisure. The problem with this scenario is that it allows the producer to profit extremely at the expense of the consumer. I dont think Id too willingly pay more than fifteen dollars for a CD, and the record companies know this. Five million CDs sold at whatever wholesale price gets them to be $15 retail is a lot more profit than five million CDs sold at some lower price. Labels could charge less, in the hopes that people would buy more CDs (and this is the guiding principle behind distribution houses like BMG and Columbia House), but in general the cost is going towards promotion and marketing, rather han towards the minimal expense of getting the discs made and into stores. In a capitalist organization, one concept inextricably linked to marketing and sales is that of ownership, or of intellectual property. A car company might have patent rights to manufacture and sell a particular model of car, or a record label might have the rights to make and sell a particular recording. A ham sandwich is a less specific item; anyone can make a sandwich and sell it, but only McDonalds has the legal right to call it an Arch Deluxe. This structure works well for assigning rights to the inventor or patent holder of a product f someone designs a new kind of carburetor, they should have the right to exclusive manufacturing and marketing, without worrying about someone else capitalizing on that invention. This structure has been extended to cover the more abstract notion of intellectual property, thus giving an individual or company the exclusive legal right to manufacture a certain musical recording, to sell a piece of software, or to use the words Enjoy Coke in a commercial context, since what is owned in these cases is intellectual property information, binary data, or an advertising slogan. But does it make sense to extend the concept of ownership to these things? In all cases of ownership, or holding the patent to an invention, the real thing being owned is the right to make use of certain information for profit. I could make and sell South Park T-shirts, but since I havent gotten permission from its owners, Im breaking copyright law. I could steal someones design for a carburetor and produce them myself, but we generally agree that the inventors rights are being infringed upon, since I havent arrived at that carburetor design by any effort of my own. Stealing, we say, is wrong. The question is, what is stealing? The most obvious kind of property theft is that of stealing tangible physical objects. If I take someones ham and swiss without their permission, its theft. The difference between this and what we call intellectual property theft is the fact that if I take someones sandwich, they can no longer eat it, but if I take (say, make a copy of) their software or musical recording, theyre not at any real loss they can still use the software or listen to the music. But, if they had intended to sell copies of said software or music, they are losing in that Ive ust acquired for free what they had intended to charge me money for. Often the two kinds of theft are considered as one, but I feel that a distinction needs to be made due to the two very different natures of what is being stolen. Lets push this a little further with an example that is commonly debated in the music industry regarding its morality sampling. Now, a sampler is a tool like any other, and plenty of musicians use it to record original samples for musical composition purposes, but plenty of others also use sampling technology to outright plagiarize other musicians work. Legal and permissions issues aside, this can be a dubious artistic undertaking, and there are artistic differences between what Puff Daddy is doing with sampling, and what the Future Sound of London is doing with it. The fact is, sampling has become simply another musical tool a logical extension of what composers have done throughout history by borrowing melodic and tonal ideas from one another albeit one that can be quite easily abused. Music isnt the only art form to involve dubious kinds of originality. Phraseology and style are borrowed, traded, and stolen in the iterary world constantly a creative writing professor once told me that Bad writers borrow; good writers steal. Visual arts are often built upon styles throughout history, and forms such as photomontage or collage may involve copyrighted pictures of other artists works. Photography itself is a way of artistically capitalizing on images and scenes that anyone can see with their own eyes, the camera a kind of visual sampler. In these cases it comes down to a question of whether the writer or artist being stolen from is losing anything in terms of intellectual property and marketability. Its ertainly true that some artistic statements can only be made by outright theft of anothers creation, for the purposes of placing the original work in a new context. A good example is a sculpture on Bowling Green State Universitys campus. POETRY ANALYSIS Argumentative EssayThe artists who choose to use traditional methods cassettes, film, and paper to create and distribute their work stand a lesser likelihood of having their work duplicated or altered than those who port their creations to digital. Digital is more practical for some reasons: you can fit wice your weight in books on a CD-Rom; email is faster and cheaper than postal mail; digital video offers possibilities undreamed of in the days of film. But with all that enhanced convenience, speed, and versatility comes the increased risk of the previously mentioned modes of duplication. Marshall McLuhan conceived that the medium is the message that the form which our communication takes is of more relevance than its actual content. Now that weve grown accustomed to the electronic medium, content is re-emerging with the rapid and inexpensive duplication and alteration that is only possible with that edium. Ive touched upon some of the comparisons that can be made between an electronic, or otherwise easily replicable product, and a physical, not-so-easily replicable product. Obviously there are differences, but are these enough to warrant the claim that ease of replicability implies a revised mode of ownership? Just because software and digital audio are easy to copy, does that mean we should? And does the digital nature of some products mean that the originator of those products should benefit any less than they would have had that product been in traditional physical form? An argument that may be used in favor of copyright protection for electronic media is that if an artist or programmer is hoping to make a substantial living through sale of their work, then that work should be protected. Why should an article or novel be protected any less merely because it is published on the World Wide Web, rather than in a print magazine? In both cases, the original author should have the right to claim ownership of what theyve written especially if someone else stands to profit by taking that work and unjustly claiming it as their own. Contrastingly, he author should also have the right to publish their work as public domain, or anonymously and thus claiming no ownership rights on it but we may also agree that it would be equally unjust if someone were again to take that work as their own and profit by it (this latter case is different only in that the original author is not losing out, since they had never planned to profit by their creation in the first place). In both cases we usually consider it wrong for the work to be stolen, regardless of what conditions the original author published it under. Is it feasible to utilize another kind of copyright rotection one which protects a public domain creation from being unjustly stolen? This is something like what is happening with GNU/Linux and its source code; part of its license provides for protection from patents. Or, to quote from the GNU General Public License itself, any patent must be licensed for everyones free use or not licensed at all. This is quite a powerful idea. The authors of a work of public domain software have ensured that it remains public domain. The driving concept here is the idea that allowing the community to directly influence the evolution of the software (by giving them he source code and all the rights that the original authors have), everyone benefits. Rather than one company benefitting at the cost of the community (as is the case with most commercial software) the free software ethic provides a way for everyone to benefit, and moreover provides protection from those who would leverage that freedom for personal gain at the expense of the community. Might this be applied to realms of creation other than software? Just as there are functional advantages in allowing a community to modify a piece of software, might there be literary advantages in publishing poems, articles, essays, or ven novels as public-domain works? Or musical advantages to publishing free sample, drum loop, or song databases? Musicians and writers are known to be a picky bunch when it comes to letting others tamper with their work and of course, those that dont want their work tampered with can always copyright it and claim ownership for themselves, just as most software authors copyright their work and dont release the source code. But for those who wish to contribute artistic works to a community-based effort, under the assumption that others will revise and improve those works, protection should also be offered. Granted not everyone is capable of improving on someone elses creation, but as long as everyone has equal access and privelege to alter those creations, the best end product will eventually emerge. If you stir up the pot enough, the cream eventually rises to the top, and it will be there for everyone to share and benefit from. One of the provisions of United States copyright law is for the copyright owner to authorize others to have any of the rights that they, the copyright owners, have. Section 106 of the U. S. Copyright Law grants the owner of a copyright xclusive rights to do and to authorize any of a number of things that we commonly assume to be the rights of a copyright holder: to reproduce the work, to prepare derivatives of it, to distribute or sell copies of it, and to present the work publicly. And Section 201d provides for the owner of a copyright to transfer ownership of that copyright to someone else, thus giving them all of the same rights that is, the right to reproduce, modify, and sell the creation, as well as transfer ownership to someone else. Sound similar to what Ive been talking about? A mistake that I often witness oes something like this: MP3s are illegal because theyre stolen from the musician who actually made the song. This misnomer is familiar to anyone whos spent any time browsing the MP3 culture on the internet; its often difficult to convince the mistaken party otherwise, since it is indeed common for MP3 to be used illegally, thanks to its high quality and portability. In the days when a copyright can be owned on a brand name, a trademark on a simple phrase, or a legal claim of intellectual ownership of a bunch of zeroes and ones that exist on someone elses hard drive, it is easy to assume that simply ecause a certain file format is commonly associate d with illegal activity, that format itself is illegal. For a while Ive argued that were already progressing beyond the conventional idea of owning physical objects, to the modernized concept of owning ideas and information. Already most of the cost of a compact disc or software package goes towards its development, advertising and marketing all of which are services, rather than substantial realities like a ham and swiss sandwich. It would only be a small step to remove the physical aspect of those products entirely; consumers would pay for the privelege of owning the MP3s of an album, or of running certain software on their computer, of owning the Acrobat files of their favorite novels, of having a painting by their favorite artist in their Windows background. But such a reality will push even further the insecurity of intellectual ownership; currency is already so largely electronic that perhaps one day the distinction between electronic currency and electronic property will become so blurred that the two merge. One piece of art, music, or software would be paid for with another instant electronic barter. And then, who will be able to claim ownership of anything?

Allomorph Inflection and Noun Plural Morpheme free essay sample

Different allomorph of the root may be used depending on the grammatical word of which it forms part. We will illustrate this by contrasting the base form, the past form and the past participle form of the following verbs: Base Past tense Past participle a. jump call He jump-ed yesterday. He call-ed yesterday. He has jump-ed. He has call-ed . b. ride drive He rode yesterday. He drove yesterday He has ridden. He has driven. c. sing stink She sang yesterday. She stank yesterday. She has sung. She has stunk. 2. 1 In [a] regular verb stems like â€Å"jump† remain unchanged all three columns. The formation of the past tense and the past participle is simply accomplished by the suffixation –ed. This contrasts with the verb in [b] and [c] where the grammatical word that is realised by the word-form dictates the allomorph of the stem that is used. Thus in [b] we see the base form â€Å"ride† (as in I ride). We will write a custom essay sample on Allomorph: Inflection and Noun Plural Morpheme or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page But if â€Å"ride† is in the past tense it must be realised as rode and if it is past participle that is required, then the form selected is ridden. Similarly, in [c] the base form of sing is sing (as in I sing). But if â€Å"sing† is in the past tense, it must be realised as sang and if it is in the past participle that is required, then the form selected is sung, and so on. This is a case of the selection allomorph of the root being solely conditioned by grammatical factors. Hence it is called grammatical conditioning. 3. The lexically-conditioned allomorph: The selection of inflectional affixes may be determined by the presence of a particular lexical root morpheme. Hence this is called lexical conditioning. A classic example pf this in English is the way in which â€Å"ox† forms its plural as â€Å"oxen† rather than â€Å"oxes†. Phonologically and grammatically comparable words like fox ? foxes and box ? boxes from their plurals using the regular /-z/ suffix. In the phonology and grammar of modern English, there is nothing that explain why ox has oxen as its plural. The suffix –en singles out this particular word. In other words, -en is a lexically conditioned allomorph of the plural morpheme. Our final example involves nouns which remain unchanged in the plural: Singular Plural sheep sheep deer deer equipment equipment aircraft aircraft 2. 2 If a farmer said to you: I have just lost one sheep but my neighbor has lost 200 sheep this year, you would know that sheep is singular in â€Å"one sheep† but plural in â€Å"200 sheep† although the same word-form â€Å"sheep† in both cases. The plural of sheep and other words of the ilk is formed by adding a zero suffix, as it were. In spite of absence of any overt number marking, such nouns can function as plurals. A child acquiring English needs to recognise and memorise, word by word, the set of noun which take zero, rather than the suffix /-z/ because the distribution of the zero plural suffix is lexically-conditioned. . Suppletion: madness without method. Occasionally, there is no method in the madness. This is so tiny minority of cases when suppletion takes place. Then the choice of the allomorphs of a root morpheme that serve in different grammatical contexts is phonological arbitrary: the allomorphs in question bear no phonological resemblance to each o ther. That is what happens in the case of the verb â€Å"go†, which has â€Å"went† as its past tense form and â€Å"gone† as its past participle. The form â€Å"good†, â€Å"better† and â€Å"best† which belong to the adjective â€Å"good† also show suppletion since the relationship between the morphs representing the root morpheme is phonological arbitrary. It would plainly make no sense to claim that there is single underlying representation in the dictionary from which â€Å"go† and â€Å"went† or â€Å"good† and â€Å"better are derived. The best we can do as to content ourselves with listing these allomorphs together under the same entry in the dictionary. Normally, the word-forms representing the same lexeme show some phonetic similarity (see [2. ] for example). However, when suppletion occurs, the word-form that realised a lexeme bears no reasonable resemblance to the other word-forms representing the same lexeme. Mercifully, the majority of words follow general rules (for example adding the suitable phonologically conditioned allomorph of the plural /-z/ suffix) and wor d-forms belonging to the same lexeme are phonologically similar to some degree. Acquiring a language for the most part involves working out these general rules rather than using brute force to commit morphemes and their allomorphs to memory. III. Summary: The selection of allomorph to use on a given occasion ma be conditioned by phonological, grammatical, or lexical factors. Normally, phonological conditioning is due to assimilation: the allomorph that occurs in a particular context is the one that is most similar to the sounds found in neighboring forms. However, the choice of allomorph is sometimes grammatically conditioned. If a root morpheme occurs in a particular grammatical word, then it must have a certain specified allomorph.

Proceso expedito para tramitación urgente de visa

Proceso expedito para tramitacià ³n urgente de visa Cuando se inicia una solicitud o peticià ³n ante el Servicio de Inmigracià ³n y Ciudadanà ­a (USCIS, por sus siglas en inglà ©s) los plazos de tramitacià ³n pueden ser muy largos. Por lo que es razonable plantearse si es posible acelerarlos  mediante un pago premium.  La respuesta es afirmativa pero sà ³lo en casos relacionados con peticiones por trabajo. En este artà ­culo se informa de los casos en los que se puede pedir el aceleramiento en la tramitacià ³n de una peticià ³n mediante un pago premium, quià ©n lo puede solicitar, cunto se demora, cul es el costo y cà ³mo contactar con USCIS para resolver problemas o dudas que surjan en dicha tramitacià ³n. Tramitacià ³n expedita  con USCIS  mediante un pago premium Es posible un pago premium en peticiones por trabajo, que comprende dos grandes grupos: cuando se solicita   para un extranjero una visa de trabajo temporal  en la que el empleador debe utilizar el formulario I-129.o cuando el empleador utiliza una planilla I-140 para pedir por razà ³n de trabajo una tarjeta de residencia permanente, conocida tambià ©n como green card. Tambià ©n se admite, en casos extraordinarios, auto-peticià ³n por parte de un trabajador. Esto significa que puede solicitarse en los siguientes casos: Visa E-1, comerciante al amparo de un tratadoVisa E-2, inversor al amparo de un tratadoVisa H-1B, trabajadores extranjeros especiales o modelos. En este caso el gobierno ha anunciado la suspensià ³n temporal del proceso expedito que se reanudar el 10 de septiembre de 2018.Visa H-2B, trabajadores temporales para trabajos no agrà ­colasVisa H-3, trabajadores en prcticas o visitantes de intercambio en el campo de la educacià ³n especialVisa L-1, L-1B y LZ, trabajadores transferidos dentro de una empresa o subsidiarias de la mismaVisa O-1 para trabajadores con extraordinaria habilidad en Ciencias, Deportes, Arte, Educacià ³n o NegociosVisa O-2 para trabajadores que son un apoyo esencial para los titulares de una visa O-1Visa P-1, P-1S, P-2, P-2S, P-3 y P-3S, para deportistas individuales y de equipo, artistas y personal de apoyo para participar en un programa o evento à ºnico o que formen parte de un programa de intercambio cultural.Visa Q-1, para extranjeros participando en un prog rama de intercambio cultural internacional Visa R-1 para religiososVisa TN-1 y TN-2, para canadienses y mexicanos al amparo del Tratado de Libre comercio  (NAFTA, por sus siglas en inglà ©s)Visa EB-1, para extranjeros con habilidades extraordinarias, profesores e investigadores excepcionales y gerentes y ejecutivos de multinacionales.Visa EB-2, para profesionales con titulacià ³n avanzada o habilidad excepcional.Visa EB-3, para profesionales, trabajadores especializados y otros trabajadores El USCIS puede suspender temporalmente el procesamiento premium para alguna de esas visas. En el momento en que se escribe este artà ­culo no est vigente ninguna excepcià ³n. Es decir, se puede aplicar para todas las peticiones enunciadas. Costo del procesamiento premium y a quà © da derecho En la actualidad es de $1.225. Sin embargo, esta cantidad puede variar por lo que es muy conveniente verificar con la pgina oficial del USCIS. Si la solicitud se hace por internet utilizando el sistema de e-file, el pago puede realizarse mediante tarjeta de crà ©dito, dà ©bito o transferencia desde una cuenta de un banco en Estados Unidos. Por el contrario, si se envà ­a una solicitud en papel, el pago debe hacerse mediante un cheque de un banco en Estados Unidos o por money order. El pago da derecho a que el USCIS acuerde una respuesta en el plazo de 15 dà ­as naturales  a contar desde el dà ­a en el que se recibià ³ la solicitud de procesamiento premium con su correspondiente pago.   La respuesta no significa siempre que se obtiene la aprobacià ³n, sino que puede ser cualquiera de las siguientes: Una carta de aprobacià ³n de la peticià ³n de visa o de tarjeta de residenciaUna carta en la que se pide ms informacià ³n o documentacià ³n. Es lo que se conoce como Peticià ³n de Evidencia o RFE, por sus siglas en inglà ©s.Una carta en la que se notifica la intencià ³n de rechazar la peticià ³n. Se conoce como NOID, por sus siglas en inglà ©s.Y, finalmente, puede que lo que se notifique es que se   inicia una investigacià ³n porque se sospecha que la peticià ³n es fraudulenta o se ha mentido en la misma o se ha presentado documentacià ³n de apoyo falsa. En el caso de que USCIS haya respondido con una RFE o una NOID, el solicitante debe contestar en el tiempo que se le otorga en la notificacià ³n. Y, una vez que el USCIS recibe las  alegaciones o la documentacià ³n  adicional que pidià ³, tiene que responder en el plazo de 15 dà ­as naturales. En casos extraordinarios puede suceder que USCIS no responda dentro de los 15 dà ­as siguientesa  haber recibido la peticià ³n de tramitacià ³n premium.   En estos casos est obligado a regresar el coste del trmite y, adems, a responder inmediatamente.   Adems, el pago premium da derecho a utilizar un telà ©fono especial gratuito, el 1-866-315-5718, para resolver dudas o hacer preguntas relacionadas con la peticià ³n de la visa. Cà ³mo se solicita el pago premium para acelerar una peticià ³n con USCIS El formulario para solicitar la  aceleracià ³n de los trmites  es el I-907. La solicitud se puede realizar  conjuntamente  con el envà ­o de los formularios I-129,   en el caso de visa de trabajo temporal, o I-140, cuando se solicita la tarjeta de residencia por trabajo. Tambià ©n puede enviarse  por separado  en un momento posterior. Resaltar que la peticià ³n de tramitacià ³n acelerada sà ³lo la puede solicitar la empresa o emprendedor o su abogado  que son los que piden la visa. Nunca puede solicitarla el beneficiario de la peticià ³n, excepto en el caso en el que un trabajador de cualidades excepcionales solicita  una tarjeta de residencia para sà ­ mismo sin patrocinador. Por el contrario, el pago del formulario I-907 pueden efectuarlo no sà ³lo la empresa o  su abogado, sino tambià ©n la persona extranjera que resultarà ­a beneficiada por este trmite.  ¿A quà © no da derecho el pago premium para acelerar los trmites? En primer lugar, este pago no levanta los là ­mites anuales en el nà ºmero de visas que se pueden aprobar dentro de cada categorà ­a  por aà ±o fiscal. Es decir, si se ha agotado el nà ºmero de visas disponibles, con o sin pago premium hay que esperar al siguiente aà ±o fiscal para que se abra de nuevo la disponibilidad de visas. Tampoco da derecho a beneficios extra en los casos en los que existe una loterà ­a para determinar quià ©nes son los beneficiados de una visa, como por ejemplo con las visas de la familia H, en particular con la H-1B para profesionales. En los aà ±os en los que el nà ºmero de solicitudes excede en menos de una semana al total de visas disponibles para un aà ±o fiscal se procede a decidir por sorteo quià ©n es el ganador. El pago de procesamiento premium no da ventaja en esa loterà ­a. En tercer lugar, el pago premium no se admite en visas o en tarjetas de residencia cuyo proceso se inicia con formularios distintos al I-129 o al I-140. Por ejemplo, no es posible en las visas de turista, estudiante, intercambio, etc. Tampoco en las peticiones de green card por razà ³n de familia, algunas de las cuales sufren grandes demoras, como son los casos de  las peticiones de ciudadano americano para hermanos, hijos casados o hijos solteros mayores de 21 aà ±os o las de residente para sus hijos solteros mayores de 21 aà ±os. Este artà ­culo es informativo. No es asesorà ­a legal para ningà ºn caso concreto.

Social Work Mental Health Literature review Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Social Work Mental Health - Literature review Example Social workers themselves can, in turn, influence people to raise their own levels of self confidence through the positive work that they do, as well as the quality services that they provide (Gray & Schubert 2010). The degree of expertise that a social worker has, and the skill sets that they come into the position with, largely depends on the quality of the training that they have received. With this in mind, it can be said that social workers need to be trained to take it upon themselves to improve their own effectiveness in work with individuals that have a mental illness, all in an effort to perform the various job functions assigned to them with excellence. To accomplish this objective will require possessing the ability to manage a complex discipline, in addition to the challenging situations that arise on a daily basis, in order to provide maximum benefit to both the individual and to society as a whole. The focus of the following literature review is to provide the reader wi th a cursory overview of the function that social workers play within the treatment of mentally ill individuals, as well as a critical analysis of two health models that more effectively cover this topic in depth (Bogg 2014). Recent trends indicate that social workers can literally transform the lives of people that have a mental health condition. This demonstrates their significance in modern society (Allen 2014). This is accomplished through their ability to improve the quality of services provided to people that have a mental illness and through the dedication exhibited by social workers, as they are the very professionals trained and this field and possess the capability to truly make a difference in this discipline. It should be mentioned, as well, that the field of mental health is a ripe area for the practice of social work, and within this context such individuals are well positioned to impact society in a positive manner. Social workers do provide

Carnivores of the Kalahari Desert Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Carnivores of the Kalahari Desert - Term Paper Example The desert is characterized by extreme temperatures during the day and very low temperatures at night due to the fact that there are no clouds to tap the heat and maintain the warm temperatures at night. The land experiences little rainfall and the temperature during summer often tends to be very high. Most of the carnivores that inhabit the Kalahari Desert have a higher likelihood of survival in high density areas. The main predator in the Kalahari Desert is the lion. The only other predator in the dessert that can somehow be viewed as a competitor to the lions is the spotted hyena. The cheetah is not specific about its preys and can be liberal about the prey it chose to hunt. This is likely to increase its chances of survival in the desert. The spotted hyena, unlike the brown hyena, hunts it’s on prey and is not a scavenger. In addition, they are not particular about their prey and can go after any species except for buffalos and giraffes. Introduction The Kalahari Desert is a large arid to semi-arid sandy area situated in Southern Africa, and extends to about 900,000 square kilometers, covering most parts of Botswana and portions of Namibia and South Africa, as a semi-desert, with large tracts of good grazing lands after rains (Thomas & Shaw, 2009). The geography of the area is part desert and part plateau. Because not the whole of the Kalahari is a true desert, it supports the existence of plants and land over the vast amount of land. The land experiences little rainfall and the temperature during summer is often very high (Lonely Planet Publications, 2009).

TTS Systems for Android

TTS Systems for Android   ABSTRACT There are different kinds of TTS (Text to Speech) systems are already available for Personal computers and web applications. In the Platform of Smart Phone, few of TTS systems are available for Bangla Language. Nowadays android is a popular platform considering Smartphone. There are few Bangla TTS Systems are Available with different kind of Mechanisms and techniques, various kind of tools were used. Here we tried to introduce all mechanisms together and proving a summary above all existing system. Introduction There are more than 250 million people over 4 states of 2 countries in the world speaks Bengali. We are looking for a device which would be able to read any bangla text aloud. So now there is no other device than mobile phone as a better option. There are more than 14 million mobile users in Bangladesh and 30% of them are using smart phones. Use of smart phones are increasing day by day because of reliability, maximum features, capable of using faster internet and eligible for open source application based system. So these kind of features are making our communication very easier and maximum communication is happening over text messaging. So for making our life very easier there are many TTS engines are available for English and many other languages. For bangla there are few more TTS Systems are available in smart phones Platform. Text and Speech both are very powerful communication infliction. If we can make it easier by converting from text to speech or vice versa than it would be a great achievement in communication life cycle, it will make communication easier than before. People would be able to speak their own words by texting only via Mobile Phone. Speech is the most natural form of communication and interaction. Speech Synthesis is a major part of TTS engine and for Bangla it is done in many different ways by different authors. From all those we will get the basic idea of Speech Synthesis Techniques. It is apparent that we are using pre recorded voices for TTS engines yet. Maximum system renders symbolic linguistic representation. So we will discuss about the existing system and possibilities of making the voice very much realistic. The concatenation of final token of speech should be patterned as like real communication. Recorded voices are stored in Database. System differ in the size of the stored units. As for being the speeches or words recorded by human then the clarity may vary. Maximum author tried to put most of the effort to code optimization and database compression. Theyve tried to found many new methods of Speech Synthesis also. Android is a popular Smart phone operating system because of it allows open source applications to install and use, For this reason anyone can try for making better applications for using or business purpose. So it is very important to build a bangla TTS for android. The purpose of our research is to introduce with all of the best TTS Existing systems for Bangla in Android Platform, and ensuring the quality research outputs , findings and Placing possible future works .We discussed about the key points of individual authors and at the end we shown the comparison between all of those. Edification and research for Bangla TTS Engine was improved very highly in last few years. For Android mobile there are many publications available. So here we will discuss about few of them. Case Study 1: After studying the paper Title (A benglai Speech Synthesizer on Android OS), authors names (Sankar Mukherjee and Shyamal Kumar Das Mandal ), we have found that they were trying to develop Bengali speech synthesizer on mobile device. They have used Epoch Synchronous Non Overlap Add (ESNOLA) based concatenative speech synthesis technique for Speech generation. They work hard for database compression because where as space was very limited, small diaphone database was being used in previous days which reduced the quality of synthesized Speech. But in other hand (Pucher, M. and Frohlich, 2005) introduced with large unit selection database, they used a Server for synthesized output speech. It was mandatory to transferred the wave form to a mobile device over a network. They tried a quality output in almost real-time on Mobile device. Speech synthesis is the method of input text data to speech waveforms conversion. The Synthesis method ascertained by the vocabulary size. For utterances of the speech need to be modeled. There are many speech synthesis techniques such as rule-based, articulatory modeling and concatenative technique. But here they developed their synthesizer based on Epoch Synchronous Non Overlap Add (ESNOLA) concatenative speech synthesis method. ESNOLA provides moderate processing for proper matching between different segments during concatenation and it supports unlimited vocabulary without decreasing the quality. So this could be proposed as a good technique of Speech Synthesis. They have designed their full operational method as the given diagram. They divided the system in 4 parts including Input text and output speech state. In between they have planned two important states which is Text analysis module and Synthesizer Module. Where the major operations designed to be performed. A perfect speech required many things such as intonation, prosody, phonological words. And specially handling exception is mandatory while converting text to speech. In this paper they have tried to work with all those parts have mentioned. In their system model they introduced a module named Text analysis module. Which have two sections named phonological analysis module and other one is Analysis of the text for prosody and intonation. They work with the exceptional words at the first Phonological rule part. They developed and implemented phonological rule analysis of the text for prosody and intonation as (Basu, J et al., 2009). They have also work with the exceptional dictionary due to requirement of language analysis. So total processing of text related part ends in phonological analysis module. And synthesizing will be done by the next module. Synthesizer module works for generating a realistic and quality speech .after getting the finalized text from text analysis module they generate a token and then combine splices of pre-recorded Speech and generate the synthesized voice output using ESNOLA approach as in Shyamal Kr Das Mandal, et al. (2007). In ESNOLA approach, the synthesized output speech is generated by concatenating the basic signal segments from the signal dictionary at epoch positions. They synthesized like e.g à  Ã‚ ¦Ã‚ ­Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¦Ã‚ ¾Ãƒ  Ã‚ ¦Ã‚ ²Ãƒ  Ã‚ §Ã¢â‚¬ ¹ = bh + bha + a + aL+o . They had implemented their application in below System specification. Memory management is a major issue in android platform otherwise it wouldnt be used broadly. In this paper they have mentioned that This context will live as long as this application is alive and does not depend on the activities life cycle. It is obtained by calling Activity.getApplication(). They kept the partneme database in external storage card. And the best part is after producing output the final speech file will be deleted. For this TTS system there are total 596 sound files stored in the partneme database. Total size of the database is 1.0 Mb and application size is 2.26 Mb. The best part of this TTS system is it can read Bengali message from phones inbox and it also can generate speech by writing the Bengali word using English alphabet format. Performance And Quality Evaluation is the major part of any Application. Here the total processing time is counting from the starting time ( button is pressed to speak) to the first speech sound is pronounced. They had test the application in many ways and the output of all result is given below They have also judged their application by audience. To measure the output speech quality 5 subjects, 3 male (L1, L2, L3) and 2 female (L4, L5), are selected and their age ranging from 24 to 50. 10 original (as uttered by speaker) and modified (as uttered with android version) sentences are randomly presented for listening and their judgment in 5 point score (1=less natural 5=most natural). The result is given below. The total average score for the original sentences is 4.72 and the modified sentence is 2.88. In their paper, they describe about implementation of a Bengali speech synthesizer on a mobile device. Their goal was to develop a text-to-speech (TTS) application that can produce real time Speech. They modified several components in ESNOLA to make it run on android device. Case Study 2: The objective of a TTS engine is to convert some language Text into its spoken equivalent by a series of modules. For a better TTS engine language modeling and Speech synthesis is major units. After Studying the paper Title( Text to speech for Bangla Language using Festival) authors names (Firoj Alam , Promila Kanti Nath and Dr. Mumit Khan) we found they have used the open-source third party tool Festival TTS engine. Festival provides a frame work for building speech synthesis systems for any TTS engine. The Festival system is written in C++ and uses the Edinburgh Speech Tools Library for low level architecture and has a Scheme (SIOD) based command interpreter for control. Festival Provides API documentation. In their TTS engine they have used two different kind of concatenative methods: unit selection and multisyn unit selection which supported in Festival. In their research they have discussed about Text Analysis, Phonetic analysis Grapheme to phoneme Conversion, Prosodic Analysis, Speech Database or Waveform Synthesis, Speech Output and Analysis of output result. The input text may come in non standard way, considering this problem they have used the text analysis part to convert all non standard words to standard words. Their grapheme-to-phoneme module produces strings of phonemic symbols based on information in the written text. Final speech synthesis is accomplished by concatenative unit selection technique and multisyn unit selection technique. In their proposed system the first step is text analysis. the job of a TTS engine is to convert the input text to equivalent Speech, for this reason the input text should convert to a standard format. There is always a chance that the input text may contain NSW (Non-Standard Word) type words. Here the author listed the NSW words as e.g. numbers (year, time, ordinal, cardinal, floating point), abbreviations, acronyms, currency, dates, URLs. They have used Text normalization for formatting NSW to SW (Standard Word) and they disambiguate the ambiguous token using rule. In their research they didnt work with Unicode directly because Festival doesnt support Unicode, So that they convert Unicode text to ASCII. In text analysis part they Split the token based on white-space and punctuation. They consider white space as a separator and Punctuation can separate the raw tokens. Festival Ordered list of tokens, each with features of white-space, and punctuation. For tokenization White-space is the most commonly used .they have identified Bangla Language have more than 10 types of NSW, so each NSW can identify as separate token by token identifier rules. They used scheme regular expression in festival to identify the token. After identifying of all NSW they convert it to standard word by pronunciation lexicon or (letter to sound) LTS rule. Pronunciation of a word sometimes doesnt match with the pronunciation form. They have solved this problem by using list of lexicon and LTS rule. They inserted 900 lexicons with its pronunciation in the lexicon dictionary. The Steps of Phonetic Analysis within festival: 1. Building large amount of lexicon. 2. Building letter-to-sound rules. They have used three techniques for concatenative synthesis: diphone, unit selection and multisyn-unit selection.They identified 45 phones excluding 31 diphthongs with their features based on articulatory analysis. To build diphone database they include diphthong as well. In their implementation they excluded the diphthongs. The duration they added is taken from Kiswahili TTS system but This is not exact duration for the phone set of Bangla language. They have approximately recorded 500-900 utterance to cover most frequent words of language. The analogy of the system was tested in two ways: in terms of acceptability/naturalness and in terms of intelligibility. Synthesized speech was evaluated on three levels: sentence level, word level and phrase level. In case of sentences level the intelligibility rate being close to 85%. On phrase level it is 83.33% and word level it is 56.66%. In their second experiment, degree of naturalness of the synthesized speech was assessed, again on sentence 90%, phrase 85% and word level 65%. The results Obtained are shown in below Figure. Case Study 3: Their model consist of three part, 1st one is LINGUISTIC MODULE what generate a linguistic representation from text. 2nd one is ACOUSTIC MODULE which generates speech from the linguistic representation. And the 3rd and final one is VISUAL MODULE which driving a talking head based on the linguistic representation. They created a relational lexical database from three source lexica: The Carnegie Mellon Pronouncing Dictionary, Moby Pronunciation II and COMLEX English pronouncing lexicon. There have almost entered 200,000 word, of which over 1500 are non-homophonous homographs. The interesting part of their project is they used animated image which will moved on the subject. In their Linguistic Module they token textual input and looks up word pronunciations and tags in the lexical database. Which words are not present in their lexical database they used a dynamic programming alignment algorithm that algorithm described for aligning sequences from the same alphabets. In Letter-to-sound neural network they defined features for a letter to be the union of the features of the phones that that letter might represent. When they get competitive results they thought that improved performance will come from simplifying the phonological representations found in the dictionary. By this they built a prelimi nary linguistic representation of the utterance. Then the linguistic representation submitted to a postlexical module where lexical pronunciations derived from the lexicon are converted to postlexical pronunciations typical of the speaker. They consider the distance to word, phrase, clause, and sentence boundaries was included. After converting the linguistic representation they send it to the Acoustic Module, which has three stage 1.Duration Neural Network , 2.Phonetic Neural Network and 3.Waveform Synthesizer . The acoustic module established the timing of the speech signal by associating segment duration with each phone in the linguistic representation. An acoustic representation, consist of input parameters for the synthesis portion of a vocoder, is generated for each ten-millisecond frame of speech. Finally, the synthesis portion of the vocoder is used to generate speech from these acoustic descriptions. The most interesting part of their module is that they are providing the video for the speech, so it looks like natural. And that reason they collect the animated image from the nature. The video subsystem takes the output of the linguistic module and the output of the duration neural network and generates an animated figure by using an additional neural network. Case Study 4 : Sanghamitra Mohanty has developed a very intelligent tool, which provides four Indian language Speech output at a time Hindi, Odiya, Bengali and Telegu. For all language she has considered a common system what she named Priyambada. She found Indian languages are phonetic in nature, and the progenitor phoneme mapping is linear. So the vowel and the consonant of the language are almost same except some of them. She took those in consider and apply algorithm for that. We found three stage on this TTS system. First one is Speech Corpora Creation. Here she identified speakers for four native languages, and get them in a laboratory environment using noise cancellation microphone. The sampling rate is 16 bit in single channel of 16000 Hz.By this way she collect the voice from the speakers. Secondly she creates a database for the Different Syllables from the text. She also stored individual polysyllables for different languages in a .wav file format. Finally she played the .wav files for the represented data. There she does not give the solution for the new word what is not in her present. With C++ language she developed a very interesting tool what plays very important role. Case Study 5: They actually focus to normalize the text. Most probably their work is same, their processes are tokenization, token classification, token sense disambiguation and word representation. They found some ambiguous tokens in bangla language. Like, Bangla use many language(English, Arabic, Hindi etc) in their language. the most challenging part of token are the numbers, dates, year, time, multi-text genre etc. To solve this problem they found two ways. One is to token normal bangla language and another table is to handle the ambiguous words. They levels three stage to token a word i) Tokenizer what will used to token the English and other South Asian scripts Bangla ii) Splitter is used for Punctuation and delimiter and iii) to token phone number, year, time and floating point is used Classifier. It also check the contextual rules, different form of delimiters was removed in this stage, for each type of token, regular expression were written in .jflex format all are checked in this stage. To make the ambiguous token natural this part is used for. The ambiguous words like non-natural number cardinal, ordinal, acronym, and abbreviations will sound natural. For this the used some stages. Those are (i). traverse from right to left. (ii). Map first two digits with lexicon to get the expanded form (i.e. 10 à ¢Ã¢â‚¬  Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ ten). (iii). After the expanded form of the third digit insert the token hundred. (iv). Get expanded form of each pair of digit after third digit from the lexicon. (v). Insert the token thousand after the expanded form fourth and fifth digit and lakh after expanded form of sixth and seventh digit. They will continue those stages. After each of second block they insert the token koti to make it natural By this way they believe they can make perfection of 99% of the ambiguous words. Summary of 4 case studies: Topics Case study 1 Case study 2 Case study 3 Case study 4 Case study 5 Tools ESNOLA FESTIVAL NA Priyambada JFlex Processing text type ENGLISH ASCII, UNICODE ENGLISH NOT DEFINED ENGLISH Input text type BANGLA ENGLISH ENGLISH ENGLISH ENGLISH Voice source Pre recorded Pre recorded Pre recorded Pre recorded Pre recorded Total Modules 2 3 Audio format Not define Not define Not define .Wav Not define intonation Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Utterance Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Prosody Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Phonological words Yes Yes Not defined Not defined Yes Exception Handling Yes Yes No No Yes Database length 596 files Not defined 200,000 Not defined Not defined Database size 1.0 Mb Not defined Not defined Not defined Not defined Speech quality evaluation 2.88 out of 5.00 Intelligibility rate No 85% No No Yes Word Processing speed 0.45 sec/ 2 word ( no of syllable -6 ) Not defined Not defined Not defined Not defined Accuracy 57.8% 85% 87% Not define 99% for Ambiguous word [1] Frances Alias, Xavier Servillano, Joan Claudi socoro and Xavier Gonzalvo Towards High-Quality Next Generation Text-to-Speech Synthesis:A multi domain Approach by Automatic Domain Classification,IEEE Transactions on AUDIO,SPEECH AND LANGUAG PROCESSING, VOL16,NO,7 september 2008. [2] Qing Guo, Jie Zhang, Nobuyuki Katae, Hao Yu , High -Quality Prosody Generation in Mandrain Text-to-Speech system, FujiTSu Sci.Tech,J., vol.46, No.1,pp.40-46 ,2010. [3] Gopalakrishna anumanchipalli,Rahul Chitturi, Sachin Joshi, Rohit Kumar, Satinder Pal Singh,R.n.v Sitaram,D.P.Kishore, Development of Indian Language Speech Databases for Large Vocabulary Speech Recognition System, [4] A.Black, H.Zen and K.Tokuda Statistical parametric speech synthesis, in proc.ICASSP, Honolulu, HI 2007, vol IV, PP 1229-1232. [5] G.Bailly, N.Campbell and b.Mobius, ISCA special session: Hot topics in speech synthesis, in proc.Eurospeech,Genea, Switzerland, 2003, pp 37-40. [6] M.Ostendorf and I.Bulyko, The impact of speech recognition on speech synthesis, in proc, IEEE Workshop Speech Synthesis, Santa Monica,2002,pp. 99-106. [7] Text To Speech Synthesis a knol by Jaibatrik Dutta . [8] Silvio Ferreia,Celina Thillou, Bernaud Gosselin, From Picture to Speech: an Innovative Application for Embedded Environment, [9] M.Nageshwara Rao, Samuel Thomas, T.Nagarajan and Hema A.Muthy, Text-to-Speech Syntheis using syllable line units [10] Jindrich Matousek, Josef Psutks, Jiri Krita, Design of speech Corpus for Text-to-Speech Synthesis. Beckman M. and Elam G. Guidelines for ToBI Labeling. Manuscript, version 3, 1997. [11] Corrigan G., Massey N., and Karaali O. Generating Segment Durations in a Text-to-Speech System: A Hybrid Rule-Based/Neural Network Approach. Proc. Eurospeech 97, Rhodes, September 1997. [12] Gerson I., Karaali O., Corrigan G., and Massey N. Neural Network Speech Synthesis. Speech Science and Technology (SST-96), Australia, 1996. [13] Karaali O., Corrigan G., and Gerson I. Speech Synthesis with Neural Networks. Invited paper, World Congress on Neural Networks (WCNN-96), San Diego, September 1996. [14] Karaali O., Corrigan G., Gerson I., and Massey N. Text-to- Speech Conversion with Neural Networks: A Recurrent TDNN Approach. Proc. Eurospeech 97, September 1997. [15] Kiparsky P. Lexical phonology and morphology. Linguistics in the morning calm, ed. by I.S. Yang. Seoul: Hanshin, 1982. [16] Kruskal J. An overview of sequence comparison. Time Warps, String Edits, and Macromolecules, edited by Joseph Kruskal and David Sankoff. Reading, MA: Addison- Wesley, 1983. [17] Linguistic Data Consortium. COMLEX English pronouncing lexicon. Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, version 0.2, 1995. [18] Miller C., Karaali O., and Massey N. Variation and Synthetic Speech. NWAVE 26, Quebec, October 1997. [19] Nusbaum H., Francis A., and Luks T. Comparative valuation of the quality of synthetic speech produced at Motorola. Research report, Spoken Language Research Laboratory, University of Chicago, 1995. [20] OShaughnessy, D. Modeling fundamental frequency, and its relationship to syntax, semantics, and phonetics. Ph.D. thesis, M.I.T., 1976. [21] Sejnowski T. and Rosenberg C. NETtalk: a parallel network that learns to pronounce English text. Complex Systems 1.145-168, 1987. [22] Seneff S. and Zue V. Transcription and alignment of the TIMIT database. M.I.T., 1988. [23] Tuerk C. and Robinson T. Speech Synthesis using Artificial Neural Networks Trained on Cepstral Coefficients. Proc. Eurospeech 93, Berlin, September 1993. [24] Ward G. Moby Pronunciator II, 1996. [25] Weide R. The Carnegie Mellon Pronouncing Dictionary. cmudict.0.4, 1995.

Ottawa Valley Food Products Case Study Essay

Ottawa Valley Food Products (OVFP) is a company which manufactures and distributes low calorie and diet food items. The employees at OVFP consist of 100 production workers and 18 management and support staff. R J Jennings is amongst these individuals and has worked for OVFP for 31 years. Even though he is able to retire, Jennings does not wish to do so any time in the near future. Jennings had a previous administrative assistant, Ella Arnold, who worked with him for 10 years. Ella, aged 58, decided to take early retirement due to deterioration in her eyesight. As Jennings’ assistant, Ella would work over time sometimes without pay, go above and beyond to make sure her job was done well including breaking previous personal commitments. By Ella doing this in her job, resulted in Jennings feeling she had a ‘sixth sense’ for her job, she even ran errands in her lunch break for him. When Ella retired, the personnel department replaced her with Mary Gregory. Mary Gregory is 24 years old and has qualifications in administration from a local community college as well as a well-known Canadian university. On her first day, Jennings phoned her using the interoffice telephone to ask her to get him a coffee and a newspaper on her way back from her break. He had asked this every morning for that past ten years before Mary had joined the company. Mary refused stating she was busy. After this, Jennings got his own coffee and newspaper, even though he purposely gave Mary a light workload. From this, Jennings just assumed it was first day nerves. OVFP had an important meeting coming up with agents who did not previously transport OVFP products. The meeting was to talk about and arrange production and shipping schedules before they signed a contract. When Jennings walked into the meeting, he found Mary talking to the agents about her weekend. He had asked Mary to leave the meeting, but she refused explaining to the agents she was not leaving. After the agents left, Jennings asked Mary to visit his office where he asked for an explanation of her behaviour during the meeting. She replied with an upset comment stating ‘she was not drafted into the army.’ Another incident occurred the next morning when Mary would not file away the reports in Jennings office. Jennings had stated at the end of Mary’s six week probation period she would no longer be needed in the company. Once the news of this was found out, Jennings was later faced with a note, handed to him by Karen Russell. The note stated he had two choices, either change his mind and allow Mary to continue with her job at the end of her probation period or all 10 of OVFP’s administrative assistants would take this further. They would go to Ottawa to state their protest on the CBC show at six o’clock. The administrative assistants were waiting for Jennings response to this in the lounge and gave him 20 minutes in order to make his decision. Assumptions made based on the report: ââ€" ªThe organization was structured properly and the business is successful. The business has been running for 30 years and has a large amount of staff and managers. ââ€" ªThere are different branches or departments that produce specialized products. The different branches manage things such as dairy, vegetables and fruits and meat products ect. ââ€" ªBecause the company is so successful; all the workers have the values and objectives towards bettering the company. The workers strive toward success in the company. ââ€" ªThe company’s marketing strategy is to produce low-calorie and diet foods to grocery stores made out of high quality ingredients. Their marketing advantage is that they sell unique healthy foods at a low cost . ââ€" ªThe company has monthly goals to attain that include having the correct products ready for certain stores and having them delivered on time to the stores. They finish their work on time frequently because they have a successful business and long term customers. ââ€" ªAll of the secretaries are female. Women are specifically hired to work as secretaries for Jennings. ââ€" ªSince all of the secretaries gathered together to meet with Jennings because they were unhappy so it can be concluded that Jennings treats most of his employees unfairly and expects too much out of them. ââ€" ªJennings asks too much of his employees sometimes. He will ask them to do things that are not in their job descriptions; such as get him coffee and pick up his dry cleaning. ââ€" ªJennings may be too comfortable at his job. He is taking his employees for granted and using them to do personal favours. Problem Statement: The senior director of Ottawa Valley Food Products, R.J. Jennings, is having issues with his replacement administrative assistant. His former assistant was very outgoing and willing to work long hours in order to please her boss and to get the work done in a timely manner. When she took an early retirement, the company hired a replacement assistant for Mr. Jennings. Over her time with the company the new assistant, Mary Gregory, was at times incapable of the workload she had been given, which her predecessor had no trouble with. Not only was Mary incompetent at times, she also seemed to have no sense of proper business etiquette. On the day of an important meeting Mary decided to entertain the client with stories of her weekend while Jennings was running late. When Jennings arrived in his office he found a less than impressed client and his assistant chatting him up. After Jennings had told her to leave the office so they could commence their meeting, which was already running late, Mary scolded Jennings telling him that it was rude for him to ask her to leave and then continued with her story. After the meeting had concluded Mary was asked into Jennings’s office where he demanded an explanation. Mary protested that the situation was through no fault of her own. Mary was told shortly after the incident that her duties would no longer be needed at the end of her six week probationary period. Mary rebutted this by rallying all the administrative assistants to Mr.Jennings office with demands to be met or they would go to the CBC NEWS in Ottawa to air a piece about their story. Jennings has to make a decis ion whether or not to disregard these actions. If the piece airs on CBC NEWS, it will be nothing but bad publicity for the company. If he decides to Leave Mary in her position, she could potentially lose clients and disrupt further office interactions. Internal (Strengths and Weaknesses): Strengths ââ€" ªThe company management is well respected and the company has been running for over 30 years and supplies to grocery store. Jennings is a respected manager and has a good reputation amongst other companies that OVFP have contracts with. ââ€" ªThe Company has a high rate of employment. OVFP employs 100 production workers and 18 management and support staff. This shows that the company is successful. The company has been able to expand and needed to hire more workers to finish the required tasks on time. ââ€" ªThe Company achieves corporate objectives as they are successful in obtaining their goals. The company creates all of the goods on time and has the products delivered to certain grocers on the requested date. ââ€" ªThe company is successful because employees share the same values in the company; aiming toward success. Management ensures the job is done and that it is done with quality. The values of the workers include completing current objectives on time and with good quality. ââ€" ªThe company’s current marketing objective is to have the goods ready for their clients on time and to have the food delivered on time. This marketing objective is a strength because the employees work hard to finish the jobs. The secretaries mainly finish their assigned jobs with unfortunately some miscommunications but they work hard to finish everything. Weaknesses ââ€" ªStructure is clearly not understood by some of the employees, as Mary was not aware of some of the duties she needed to accomplish. Also, Jennings expected a lot out of her, where are she believed that she did not need complete these tasks for him because they were in her job description. Because they did not agree on what each other must do to get the day running smoothly they had a conflict. ââ€" ªThe other secretaries wanted to meet with him because they were also not happy. Jennings does not treat his secretaries fairly and expects them to work as the pace of Ella. He expects them to answer his personal calls and do other personal favours such as work overtime without pay . ââ€" ª The company does not finish all of their objectives because Mary was not completing all of the tasks Jennings assigned for her. This is why they had a conflict. ââ€" ªIf Mary could not handle the tasks Jennings was giving her then his expectations were too high. He was asking too much of her. Potentially, he could have asked for her to do simpler tasks until she got used the environment. ââ€" ªJennings did not hire Mary, human resources hired her for him. He did not have a choice therefore he may not get along with her if he doesn’t have a say in who is his secretary. The human resource department did not know what Jennings was looking for. ââ€" ªAll of the secretaries were female. If they are all only women then they are violating human rights. ââ€" ª Human resources was not able to hire an efficient worker for the company. They did not hire someone fit for the job and made a mistake. ââ€" ªJennings may not be a good manager if he is asking too much from his employees. If they do not understand where he is coming from when he is asking them to do things for him they might not listen to him. Also, if he is being unreasonable the employees won’t bother doing what they are asked. ââ€" ª Human resources may not be the appropriate people to hire an assistant for Jennings. Jennings should be able to choose his own secretary to avoid further conflict. If he picked someone that he believes would fit the job description better than there would never have been a conflict to resolve. External Analysis: Political †¢Jennings had informed Mary that she would no longer be employed at the end of her six week probationary period. Mary has no real grounds to protest for her job but the administrative assistant Union is standing up for her. With a union involved, striking is always a possibility. The administrative assistants to a large load of the office work and filing. Without these workers the business will be running far less efficiently. Social †¢The way Ottawa Valley Food Products is perceived by the public is directly correlated to its sales. A local news piece that depicts the company in a negative image could have negative repercussions on the success of the company. Sometimes there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but if the company looks like it doesn’t care about its employees, that is tougher for the company to shake. Opportunities †¢With the administrative assistants up in arms, an opportunity has arisen to change the current hiring system. To ensure that no incidents happen in the future, it is possible to tweak our hiring techniques to make sure our employees are of a quality caliber and they have solid references. Jennings is however not the root of the problem, Mary is, and management should be looking seriously into this as well. The management of a corporation should not allow an administrative assistant to potentially ruin sales and lose the company money and clients. Threats †¢The threat of a unionized support staff is always looming. If the administrative assistants form a union it will be nearly impossible to fire unruly staff. Also unions usually bargain for more money, which would result in more overhead for the company. Ultimately a union would limit the amount of work that the assistants do, and give them more money. If the Assistants were to form a union, it could have direct correlation with the production of the company. †¢A new hiring standard is in desperate need at Ottawa Valley Food Products. Otherwise they run the risk of hiring more staff that could become problematic. If they continue to hire these types of staff, it could have detrimental effects on the productivity of the company. Alternatives courses of Action: Alternative #1 R.J can do nothing and continue to end Mary’s employment after the six – week probation period. This will force the 10 OVFP executive assistants to publicize their complaint on CBC. R.J. Jennings is a senior manager at OVFP who has been working with them for 31 years and Mary Gregory should treat him with respect and honor his requests. Advantages †¢R.J. Jennings has been employed at OVFP for 31 years and deserves a better administrative assistant. By continuing to terminate Mary’s employment he may be assigned an assistant that better meets his needs. †¢The cost of finding and training new employees with work equipment can end up being expensive but Mary wasn’t able to handle the duties necessary to be a successful assistant. The potential employees applying for the job can be strategically chosen through interviews so that time and money is not wasted if they hire a new assistant with extensive experience that can adapt to the new job easily and not require lots of training. †¢This option is easy to put into practice because nothing is required other than to document Mary Gregory’s progress until the six – week probation period has ended. During this period R.J. also is given enough time to search for and hire a new assistant that may better meet his needs. †¢By executing this option R.J. is also able to demonstrate his expectations to other coworkers. In future situations his coworkers will know what R.J. expects from his assistants. Disadvantages †¢By continuing to terminate Mary’s employment he will lose his assistant as well as having the potential to lose the other 10 executive assistants that are protesting this. As these other assistants do not agree with R.J.’s decision they may willingly quit. As well, by going public with this protest they can bring negative media attention to R.J. and OVFP, as thus may ruin future business deals or current business commitments. †¢The approach of doing nothing and continuing to end Mary’s employment after the six – week probation period could negatively affect the company. The company will now have to go through the trouble of hiring and training a new assistant, rather than to address and try to fix the problem with Mary. If R.J. does need to replace Mary and possibly other executive assistants, he may replace them with new employees that might not work out and in fact be worse than his current employees. †¢If R.J. does terminate Mary’s employment, lose other executive assistance and bring negative media attention to OVFP he also has the potential of losing his job. Other senior management might view him as harmful to the company and may look into putting him on a probationary period or ultimately terminating his position. Alternative #2 R.J. Jennings could bring Mary Gregory into his office and have a discussion about the situation and address the problems that he has with Mary. Allow Mary to see what Ella Arnold successfully did and how she completed her tasks for R.J. daily. R.J. also clearly needs to express his expectations for his assistant so Mary is able to understand what is required of her. R.J. can allow Mary to move forward from this point and demonstrate how she is qualified for this job. If she is given another chance she may meet his standards and adjust to being a successful assistant. R.J. may also be given the opportunity to see his demands from Mary’s perspective. Because Ella did tasks for R.J that was not in her job description, R.J. has come to expect this. Mary can be given the chance to explain that she is not there to bring R.J. his coffee and newspaper and how she felt at some of his requests. Advantages †¢The actual problem can be addressed and Mary can see what Ella Arnold did as R.J.’s assistant. Mary will be given a list of expectations that she must meet in order to continue her employment at OVFP. If Mary clearly knows what is expected of her she may be able to carry out her daily tasks successfully. If Mary does not agree with what is expected of her in this role or does not feel she can complete such tasks she may willing leave her position, without spurring the negative media attention. †¢R.J. is also given the opportunity to see how much more Ella did for him that was required. Mary may have a different work style than Ella and does not feel like she should have to be taken advantage of or do tasks that R.J. can carry out himself, such as getting R.J. his coffee. †¢This alternative allows the problem to be addressed between both parties. It can also promote further open communication between coworkers as R.J. is setting a positive example to address a problem. †¢Negative media attention can be avoided as the executive assistants will not be on the CBC newscast. Disadvantages †¢Mary Gregory might become defensive once in R.J.’s office. After R.J. addresses the problem with Mary she might have a different perspective on the situation and feel she isn’t in the wrong. R.J. may feel he has wasted time and effort trying to fix the problem with Mary. †¢If Mary does not agree with R.J. she might notify the other 10 OVFP executive assistants about the meeting she had and continue with the CBC newscast. If Mary does not agree with the discussion she had with R.J. it could fuel further negative comments being made during the newscast. †¢Mary might feel she is underappreciated because she’s always being compared to Ella. Alternative #3 Terminate Mary Gregory from OVFP as an assistant immediately without reason and without allowing the six-week probation period to expire. Mary has been given enough chances to complete what is required of her and if she still continues to struggle with the everyday tasks that R.J. assigns then she is not the right person for the assistant position. Advantages †¢Mary Gregory is no longer an employee for OVFP so they can start to find a replacement assistant immediately that can be beneficial to the company. †¢It will be easier to release Mary as an employee because she’s still on probation. †¢R.J. Jennings can get back to being an efficient, hardworking employee with no distractions to affect his work. He can find a new assistant that meets his needs and will allow him to continue to be a dedicated employee. †¢Because Mary was new to the company she does not get paid benefits or other possible layoff payments that a fulltime life employee would receive. Disadvantages †¢Employees that formed a bond or friendship with Mary might disagree with OVFP’s choice to terminate her during the probation period. These employees might show their disagreement with the company’s choice by slowing work efficiency and motivation towards their job. †¢The assistants that have threatened to appear on CBC will still do so if Mary is immediately terminated. The immediate termination may infuriate them further if Mary is fired without being given any explanation or chance to further prove her work ethic. †¢Employees might take the message in a different manner and think there not being treated fairly for the work they give to the company. The employees might think that the company feels they are replaceable and aren’t an asset towards the company’s success when that isn’t the case. This could lead to further problems such as strikes or searching for other employment. †¢Time and money will be spent during the process of finding a new assistant. Alternative #4 Allow the option to release Mary Gregory from OVFP as an assistant with reason. Again, Mary has been given ample opportunities to turn her work ethic around but has failed to do so. R.J could have a meeting and tell Mary she is no longer employed at OVFP as well as notify her of the reasons why she’s being let go. This can allow R.J. to clearly express his reasoning for the decision as well as allow Mary to express how she is feeling Advantages †¢R.J. would no longer have to work with an assistant he feels does not meet up to his standards. †¢By having a meeting and clearly explaining the reason for her termination it may diffuse the situation. Mary can be given the opportunity to see R.J.’s reasoning and may agree with some of the issues he has raised. It can also be a learning experience for Mary as she looks for new jobs she may know what is expected of her in an administrative position. †¢Mary can be given the opportunity for a fresh start at a new company. She may also be able to use R.J. as a reference or connection toother jobs. Although her job was terminated R.J. may want to help her future search and just cite the termination as a clash of personalities or Mary not being the right fit for the job. R.J. is also able to have a fresh start with a new assistant and may be more aware of how to express his expectations. †¢R.J.’s executive assistants will not go on CBC if Mary has been treated with respect and had the opportunity to have a discussion with R.J. Disadvantages †¢Negative publicity can still arise if Mary still feels she wasn’t treated equally and was terminated without given a fair chance. The other assistants may feel that it is still necessary to make this issue aware to the public by being on CBC. †¢Legal issues may be a possibility. Even though she’s a new employee she could address the situation with the labor board or human resources to see if there are any options regarding her termination (i.e. severance pay). †¢Disagreement with the decision to terminate Mary’s position by other employees might cause work ethic and efficiency to drop or other possibilities such as a strike or employees quitting. Recommendations and Plan of Action: The alternative chosen to resolve the problem statement is option four which is allowing the option to release Mary Gregory from OVFP as an assistant with reason. This alternative is favourable as Mary has been given numerous amounts of opportunities to adjust her work attitude, still chooses not to do so. By choosing this alternative, Jennings could have a meeting with Mary and explain to her why she is no longer an employee of OVFP. At this meeting, he is able to discuss the reasons to why she is being fired. Jennings will be able to justify his decision and let Mary express her feelings about the situation. By using this alternative Jennings will no longer have to work with Mary as he feels her work ethics are not to his standards of being his assistant. As a result of having this meeting, it can calm the situation as Mary is able to understand Jennings’ reasoning and may even agree with some of the issues he states. This could also allow Mary to learn from this when she looks for future jobs as she may have a better understanding of what is expected of her in an administrative assistant’s role. As a result of Mary’s termination this will allow her to have a new start with a different company. Finally, if Mary is treated with respect and given justification to her termination, the executive assistants may change their mind and withdraw from appearing on CBC. There were a number of different alternatives decided upon as well when analysing Mary Gregory’s position at OVFP. The first alternative for Jennings to do nothing and to continue to end Mary’s employment after her six weeks probation period would not be suitable. This is due to ten other OVFP executive assistants stating they would also leave the company if Mary was not employed after her probation period. They also stated they would publicise their complaint on CBC. This could result in bringing negative publicity to OVFP, which could potentially cause problems with future business deals or current business relationships. Also, by terminating Mary’s employment the company would have to go through the process of finding a new assistant for Jennings and then having to train them. By doing this, OVFP may find these new employees to not be as efficient as their previous executive assistants. Finally, Jennings may lose his own job by bringing negative media attention to the business from firing Mary and the other assistants going to CBC with their disagreements. OVFP senior management team may find this damaging to the company and its image, therefore possibly putting him on a probationary period or terminating his position altogether. The second alternative, Jennings bringing Mary into his office to discuss the situation and address any problems is also not suitable for resolving this issue. This is could result in Mary becoming defensive once Jennings begins to discuss issues with her. She might feel she is not in the wrong and have a different outlook on the situation at hand. As a result of this, Jennings may feel he has wasted his time trying to resolve the problems with Mary and her work attitude. Also, Mary might speak with other assistants once she finishes talking with Jennings and explain to them what happened. After this, they may still continue with the broadcast with CBC and if Mary does not agree with Jennings and his opinions then this could result in even more negative comments said during the newscast, again bringing destructive media attention to OVFP. Also, by Jennings doing this Mary feel unappreciated as he is always comparing her to his previous assistant, Ella Arnold. This could demotivate he r to completing her job to the best of her ability and carrying out everyday tasks Ella used to do for Jennings. Finally, the third alternative is terminating Mary from OVFP as an assistant without reason and terminating her position once her six week probation period has finished. This, again, would not be appropriate for resolving the situation as employees who have formed a working or friendly relationship with Mary might disagree with OVFP’s decision. By showing their support towards Mary, they may decide to show lack of care within their working attitudes and not complete their own jobs properly. This could bring a long, tiring issue for OVFP if their employees are not motivated to work and complete their jobs on time or to the highest of standards. Also, the assistants who mentioned they would appear on CBC will continue to do so if Mary is fired from her position. They may do this as they will be upset by Mary being terminated without any justification to why she is no longer needed at OVFP. Also, from this alternative employees may feel they are not being treated fairly for the work they contribute towards the company, therefore they may feel they are replaceable. As a result of this, employees will not feel an asset to the company or feel they are appreciated when the company achieves goals. Employees could strike due to this or seek employment in a different company. Finally, precious time and money will be wasted on finding new assistants to replace Mary and the ten executive assistants if they decide to leave OVFP. The response that Mary’s and the other executive assistants gave when they hear the news that Mary is being let go after her probation period may seem like the major key component in this case. But as stated is this report there are many other factors that play into this company problem. Mary may response in an understandings way when Jennings explains his reasoning for letting her go from OVFP or she may not. Either way OVFP must realise they need to make changes in the company to prevent a situation like this from happening in the future. Reorganizing the human resources hiring process is a great start. Job posting that clearly state what the employee duties are within the company, will avoid confuse among Mangers and assistants. Also having Managers involved in the hiring of their assistants with make sure that Managers are paired with assistants that meet there individual needs. Having Human Recourse make these changes, it will over all avoid future problems like this from arising, and will create happier for efficient, and loyal employees. Which will o ver all benefits the company with loyal employees more efficient employees the company will save money and put this money in things such as expanding or improving other components.